The long-running Clinton soap opera had its finest hour this weekend with a picture-book wedding that, for one octogenarian, evoked admiration for its restrained elegance and stirred half a century of memories. Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky were married a few miles down the road from a 1728 stone house in Dutchess County where I spent the first two decades of retirement. But if the 2008 election had turned out differently, security considerations would have almost surely prompted the first daughter...

Washington reaction to the Afghan document dump is solidifying into “How dared they release official secrets!” combined with “Nothing new here, we knew all that.” Politicians of all stripes are embracing both harrumphs. Unblessed-by-Wikileaks media people tend to favor the latter. But behind such butt-covering responses are issues that will take time to sort out. One of the leakees, David Leigh of The Guardian, points out that “a game-changing thing has happened. We...

With eerie echoes of 1971, when the leak of secret files confirmed what Americans had long suspected about the disastrous war in Vietnam, the unauthorized release of 92,000 classified documents provides a first-hand picture of its 21st century counterpart in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Back then, the Pentagon Papers marked the beginning of the end in Southeast Asia, amid a swirl of legal battles over government secrecy and the rights of a free press to report what officials were hiding. Now, the documents...

There is no Atticus Finch or Joseph Welch in all this. On the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” we are back in a time when McCarthyism played on fears to spread hatred and destroy lives of people in public life. The President, who won an election by putting the Civil Rights era behind him, will have to revisit that time before his birth and make things right not only with Shirley Sherrod but generations of Americans who have struggled for decency not only in race relations...

With falling approval ratings, Barack Obama is getting advice from all sides on how to “save” his presidency. In the latest round of parsing by pundits, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post concludes: “The bank bailout averted a financial crackup and the stimulus package pulled the economy back from the abyss. Along with reform of the financial industry and health care, these are considerable achievements. Only the voters disagree.” The reason? “No one is accusing Obama...

A century ago, Americans spent only a few minutes a day learning about the world beyond their own senses–”the unseen environment,” as Walter Lippmann put it in his 1922 study, “Public Opinion.” Back then, he despaired of “the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot...

The NAACP is pursuing its own mandate in “condemning racism within the Tea Party movement” while a Congresswoman stirs members by proclaiming, “Those who used to wear sheets are now being able to walk down the aisle and speak as a patriot because you will not speak loudly about the lack of integrity of this movement.” Garbled syntax aside, is raising racism to the top of issues presented by the Tea Party in the best interests of the first African-American president or the...

Now that America’s Sweethearts are reunited and planning to wed, they will need household gifts beyond the usual place settings and silver. Herewith a few gift suggestions for well-wishers: *Caller ID to block incoming messages from anyone named Palin or Johnston. *His and her DVDs of the 2005 Jane Fonda movie, “Monster-in-Law.” *Subscriptions to Time and Newsweek to class up their coffee table by covering copies of Us, People and Playgirl for the filming of their new reality show. *Services...

Secrets are not what they used to be. The nation’s greatest storyteller has made us wait 100 years to find out what was in his heart, but LeBron James spilled the beans on a TV special after only weeks of teasing our interest in an era when everyone from Elizabeth Edwards to Levi Johnston is sharing. Isn’t it better this way? Mark Twain’s reticence recalls that memorable Jack Nicholson line in another American classic, “You can’t handle the truth.” But in the 21st...

In an interview on the PBS News Hour, the President’s Chief of Staff demonstrates the difference between being brainy and empathetic–a problem that is becoming crucial to the White House. On a mission to shore up Barack Obama’s image as a decisive leader, Rahm Emanuel patronizes Jim Lehrer, a journalistic icon, as he tries to pin down the President’s direct involvement in such issues as the Russian spy swap and the decision to sue Arizona over its punitive new immigration...

Tea Party people, who adore Colonial times, are acting out another of its iconic stories, a 21st century version of a spectral beheaded figure terrorizing politicians with fear of losing theirs. After the toppling of such a Senate stalwart as Utah’s Robert Bennett, the Republican Party itself is virtually headless, with Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney swiping at Chairman Michael Steele’s scalp while an unlikely coalition from Ron Paul and Ann Coulter to E. J. Dionne defends his misgivings...

Mixed political weather for the nation’s 234th birthday: Barack Obama basks in a solar future while Tea Party members gather to shake their fists at what they see as darkening skies. The President, in his weekly address, looks at Colorado, Arizona and Indiana, seeing “once-shuttered factories humming with new workers who are building solar panels and wind turbines, rolling up their sleeves to help America win the race for the clean energy economy.” But, in a USA Today poll, Tea...

John Boehner, who succeeded career exterminator Tom DeLay, is being bugged by insect metaphors. The House Minority Leader told a reporter the Wall Street reform bill was like using a nuclear weapon to kill an ant and was stump-jumped by the White House in Wisconsin. “He compared the financial crisis to an ant,” the President told a crowd. “The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs…that cost people their homes and their lives’ savings.” Meanwhile,...

The FBI and KBG are still playing the old games. The Bureau, which failed to anticipate the Times Square bomber, has been relentlessly tracking Russian agents posing as suburban homeowners for years, and the former spymaster Vladimir Putin is kvetching about it “Back at your home,” he tells another retiree, Bill Clinton, drawing a laugh, “the police went out of control throwing people in jail. But that’s the kind of job they have.” The indictment of 11 “deep...

While Barack Obama was doing his Donald Trump act telling Stanley McChrystal “You’re fired!” on TV, the winner of this season’s Afghanistan Apprentice show was at the President’s side solemn and expressionless. For Gen. David Petraeus, who had fainted earlier this month while testifying before the Senate, this new assignment comes as the 21st century definition of a good soldier saluting and doing his duty in the face of a personally devastating order. To start, the...

Two incidents of stripping public figures bare bracket the question of “the public’s right to know” in an era of redefining journalism–the downfall of Gen. McChrystal and an inconvenient possible truth about Al Gore as a Clintonesque groper. David Brooks asserts the General was done in by a cultural change that has elevated “private kvetching” by public officials to the forefront of the news, citing Theodore White’s “Making of the President” books...

For someone who served under Patton in World War II and lived through the MacArthur mess over Korea, the text of McChrystal’s self-immolation in Rolling Stone still comes as a mild shock–a hard-to-believe-it’s-not-parody of macho gone mad in an era when top generals have learned to be as smooth as Petraeus, who sold Bush’s Iraq Surge without getting his hair mussed by the media. McChrystal, on the other hand, revels in projecting a Neanderthal image, starting with his complaint...

Six decades after a commanding general lost his job for bad-mouthing Harry Truman’s conduct of the Korean War, another is in the White House today apologizing for deriding Obama officials over the conflict in Afghanistan. But Stanley McChrystal is no Douglas MacArthur, a mythic figure after his triumphal World War II return to the Philippines and a consummate military politician who played Congress like a violin in opposing his President’s caution over risking war with China in Korea. Dwight...

Opening his Fathers Day gifts, Barack Obama must be basking in a rare moment of unconditional love as his White House is engulfed in a rising spill of criticism and disapproval from all sides. After what Frank Rich terms a “doomed” speech on the Gulf gush, the President this weekend is being called, on the one hand, “snakebit” by Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter who ruined Bush I’s reelection chances by having him mouth “Read my lips, no new taxes” and, on the...

In the Oil Spill, the President is sounding like Ishmael but Americans want him to act more like Ahab. “My power is not limitless,” he told Gulf residents before The Speech last night. “I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.” That exasperation is reflected in postmortems of his attempt to take political charge of an unmanageable mess that has inspired parallels with Melville’s saga of human hubris, a relentless search for oil leading...